Underneath their nonchalant manner, both Jerry Gaines and Ballou were intensely excited; and when Raymond Challoner arose to quit the place, some half an hour or so later, Gaines made a hurried excuse to leave his two friends, and passed out hurriedly in Challoner’s wake; and Ballou was thankful that John Dinsmore had not the slightest suspicion that there was anything on foot in that direction.
At that selfsame hour, little Jess was sobbing her heart out in Queenie’s boudoir.
She had promised to wed the man who represented himself to her to be John Dinsmore on the morrow—ay, had promised to link her fate for weal or for woe with a man whom she detested more and more each time she saw him.
“If it were not a sin for which God would never, never forgive me, I would end it all by taking my life here and now!” she moaned, clinching her hands together so tightly that the pink nails cut the tender flesh; but the pain in her heart was so severe, she never even felt the pain of the self-inflicted wound.
Queenie was purposely keeping out of her way, for she did not care to go over the ground that the marriage-to-be was all wrong—“all wrong and terrible,” as Jess would pitifully express it. She had given her consent, that was enough for Queenie; she never stopped to ask herself how it was to end.
By this marriage, Raymond Challoner, masquerading under the name of John Dinsmore, would gain possession of the Dinsmore millions, would turn them into cash within a week’s time, and hand her over her share of the cash for her share in bringing the marvelously daring scheme about. Further than this she did not care to look.
Of course, there would be a terrible reckoning between the real and the false heir, when the former turned up; but Queenie was content to let them fight it out as they saw fit, as long as she had her share of the money. She would go abroad, and in the mad whirl of Parisian life would try to drown her fatal love for John Dinsmore, who had flung her proffered love back into her face with such scorn.
By parting him effectually from the girl he loved, and bringing the girl within prison walls on the grave charge of bigamy, when at last he should find her, was revenge enough for even as sinister an arch plotter as herself.
She realized that there would be a stormy scene between Challoner and herself on account of her not telling him of the sudden appearance of John Dinsmore, whom he confidently believed dead, and therefore out of his way; and, most of all, that he had a legal claim upon the little heiress of Blackheath Hall.
She had not even a spark of pity in her hardened heart for the wretched young girl who was weeping her eyes out in her boudoir upstairs. She gloated, rather, over the misery of the girl who had won the love of the only man on earth whom she would ever care for.